Computing centers that employ one or more printers to serve a group of users, such as a networked group or other work group, typically rely on the printers to batch process print jobs (e.g., print-out a series of different print jobs in succession). Such printers produce separator pages which are used for identification and segregation of print jobs in an office, departmental or other shared or multi-user printing environment. Separator pages generated at the beginning of a print job are commonly referred to as headers, while pages generated after a print job are referred to as trailers. Such separator pages include one or two lines of text that identify the requesting party and identify the job number.
Separator pages have an undesirable characteristic in that they are printed with associated printing costs, and are not environmentally friendly. For example, separator pages have very little value after the user retrieves their print job, and are in many instances not recycled. Since there is typically one per print job, separator pages are particularly wasteful for smaller print jobs on a per print job page basis.
An additional problem is that separator pages may be generated or controlled by host software, a printer object or the printer itself. Thus, a lack of coordination between these different separator page generation methods may result in multiple separator pages being generated for certain print jobs.
Accordingly, a mechanism to manage generation of separator pages is desired.